Getting Information to the People Who Need It

Key takeaways

• No business holds all the facts it needs. The knowledge is scattered across people, much of it never written down, and some of it contradictory. Friedrich Hayek argued that moving this dispersed knowledge to the right people is the central problem for any growing organisation.
• Formal channels handle it badly, partly because people genuinely want to be informed and also genuinely resent sitting through meetings where everyone reads out their updates.
• Gossip is an information network, not merely noise. It routes around blocked channels and often works as an early warning system, which is why leaders who hide things slowly lose its trust and their own credibility.
• Conway's Law says your product ends up shaped like your communication structure, because the system you build mirrors the organisation that builds it.
• Cheap written channels such as a good internal newsletter often beat meetings for spreading detail, but the deeper task is to design how information moves on purpose, because it will shape what you build whether you intend it or not.

No business holds all the facts; the knowledge is scattered

In his essay "The Use of Knowledge in Society", Hayek made a point that lands harder the bigger your company gets. No single mind, and no central planner, ever holds all the facts needed to run things well, because the important knowledge is dispersed, specific to time and place, and often contradictory. The person who knows the real reason returns spiked last week is the warehouse picker, not the analyst, and the picker may never be asked. Hayek's framing of the problem is the one I keep returning to: the central challenge is how to get the knowledge on which people base their plans into the hands of those who need it, without any one person having to direct all of it. Earlier in this series I argued that you should brief analysts around decisions. This post is the organisational version of the same worry, that most of what your company knows is nowhere near where the decisions get made.

People want to be informed and hate the meeting that informs them

There is a small, maddening paradox at the centre of internal communication. Ask people whether they want to be kept informed and they say yes, always. Put them in a weekly meeting where everyone takes turns reading status updates and they die a little, and the information does not even stick. The format is expensive, slow to prepare, and badly matched to how people absorb detail. A good meeting is genuinely useful, but for a specific job: making a decision where the desired outcome, the options, and the roles are clear in advance. Used as a broadcast channel for updates, the meeting is close to the worst tool available, costly to run and weak at the very thing you brought it in to do.

Gossip is an information network, not just noise

Leaders tend to treat gossip as a problem to stamp out. It is more useful to see it as infrastructure. Research suggests men and women gossip in roughly equal amounts, despite the stereotype, and that gossip does real work: it spreads information, settles conflict, and binds groups together. It also serves as an early warning system. When there is common knowledge on the floor about a process that is quietly failing, or a manager behaving badly, gossip is often where it surfaces first, long before it reaches any formal channel. Leaders dislike it for exactly this reason: it undermines their control over the flow of information. And here is the trap many walk into. A leader who tries to "protect people" by withholding or massaging the truth eventually gets found out, because the network compares notes, and once people know you have lied to them to keep them calm, you cannot easily convince them you are telling the truth later, even when you are. The underground channel matters precisely because it is not controlled from the top.

There is an old illustration of why the form of a message matters as much as its content. Imagine a fact that everyone individually knows, but nobody knows that the others know. It changes nothing, because people act on what they believe others believe. Say it once over a loudspeaker, in front of everyone, and it becomes shared in a way that lets people finally act on it. The same fact, murmured to ten people one at a time, has a fraction of the effect it has said once to all ten together.

Conway's Law: you ship your org chart

In 1967 Melvyn Conway noticed something that has held up unreasonably well: any organisation that designs a system will produce a design whose structure copies the organisation's own communication structure. Split your engineers into a user-interface team, a server team, and a database team, and you get software carved along those three lines, with the awkward seams falling exactly where the teams have to talk to each other. The principle reaches well past software. If your merchandising team and your retention team never speak, customers will feel the gap at precisely the handover between buying and being kept. I once worked with a brand whose checkout felt disjointed for reasons nobody could pin down, until we laid the org chart over the customer journey and saw that every clunky transition sat exactly where two departments met and did not talk. The product had faithfully reproduced the silence between the teams.

Cheap written channels beat expensive meetings, up to a point

If meetings are a poor broadcast tool, the practical upgrade is usually written and asynchronous. A short, well-made internal newsletter, the kind that takes an hour to write and two minutes to read, spreads detail far more efficiently than a recurring meeting, and people can take it in when their attention is actually available. The same logic explains why marketers are often better than internal communications teams at making an idea stick: simpler messages, more repetition, less ceremony. This connects back to the first post in the series, on repetition and felt truth, with a sharper edge here, because inside a company you can use repetition deliberately and honestly, to make a genuinely important message land rather than to smuggle a dubious one through.

The structure decides what you know

The thread running through Hayek, gossip, and Conway is that information does not flow wherever you wish it would. It flows along the structure you have built, formal and informal, and that structure quietly decides which facts reach the people making the decisions. Most founders try to manage the content of communication, the updates, the announcements, the assurances, while leaving the structure to grow by accident. Hayek's challenge, the one I cannot fully answer, was how to build the culture and the processes that get dispersed, contradictory knowledge to the right people without anyone having to command it. Public announcements, private assurances, and rewards for loyalty are the levers most businesses actually run on, and none of them is the same as designing for honest flow.

A good deal of our work at Mean Decisions ends up here: mapping how information really travels inside a business, which is rarely how the org chart claims it does, and finding the blocked channels and the accidental accountability gaps before they harden. It is less glamorous than strategy and tends to matter more. What I still cannot tell a founder with confidence is how much of the informal network you can deliberately design, and how much of it, like gossip, works only because it lives beyond your control. Build too much structure and you strangle the very channel that was warning you. Leave it alone and you are trusting your most important knowledge to chance.